A normal user's look into the world of 3D Stereo Technologies

There are many people that do not like Steam and Origin for reasons that are far beyond the problems that these clients for obtaining and playing games usually provide, reasons like the inability to rename the executable file for a game in order for 3D Vision to recognize the game as a different one for example and load some extra settings that help get better stereo 3D experience at least until Nvidia provides an official profile for that specific game. This is the case with the recently released Mass Effect 3 demo that you can only download through Origin and must play with Origin running and can’t rename the executable file, so that the game is recognized as another UE3-based title such as Bulletstorm for example with the idea for 3D Vision to maybe bring better results in stereo 3D mode and the demo of ME3 to have less issues (pretending that the ME3 demo is Bulletstorm does not help even a bit however)…

The good news here is that there is a workaround to this limitation that Origin implies, with a little bit of tinkering I’ve just found out that my Steam cheat-fix for 3D Vision is also working with Origin, but with a slight difference in how it needs to be used. So here is what you need to do to make things work and be able to rename the original game executable while still being able to run the game with Origin running:

1. Open the folder containing the game files you downloaded from Origin: \Origin\Mass Effect 3 Demo\Binaries\Win32
2. Rename the game executable from masseffect3demo.exe to shippingPC-stormgame.exe for example
3. Rename the file masseffect3demo.par found in \Origin\Mass Effect 3 Demo\Binaries\Win32\Core to SippingPC-stormgame.par or the other new name that you have used for the original executable of the game
4. Extract the masseffect3demo.exe and masseffect3demo.ini files from this archive to the game folder above, you may need to edit the shippingPC-stormgame.exe variable found in the INI file if you set another name for the game executable
5. Make sure that you have the Origin client running before continuing
6. Run the shippingPC-stormgame.exe executable directly (or how you have named the original game executable) and not masseffect3demo.exe or through the Origin client, this is very important
7. That is it, you are ready… the Mass Effect 3D demo will run and the 3D Vision driver will recognize it as Bulletstorm (if you used shippingPC-stormgame.exe) or as another game based on the name of the executable you have used

This procedure should also work not only with the Mass Effect 3 Demo, but when the full game gets released as well as with other games that are available only through EA’s Origin client. Again have in mind that this is a workaround to allow you to rename the original game executable, so that 3D Vision recognizes it as another game and loads the profile for that other game including some special fixes for use in stereo 3D mode. Use this only if there is no official 3D Vision profile like for the Mass Effect 3 demo and when that game has some issues in stereo 3D mode that you think might be fixed with the 3D Vision profile with another game loaded. The example used above will load the 3D vision profile for Bulletstorm, but that will not help fix the issues in the Mass Effect 3 demo, so more experimenting with the names of different executables for games based on UE3 is required…